Press Releases

PlayMakers Repertory Company Member Receives Junior Faculty Award

Jacqueline Lawton to Develop a Play Exploring Bio-Ethics

(Chapel Hill, NC, February 10, 2017) PlayMakers Repertory Company is proud to announce that its own dramaturg and playwright-in-residence, Jacqueline Lawton, has received a Junior Faculty Award from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This award was given to help fund the research, writing and development of a new play exploring the intersection of human rights and genetics. In developing “Among These Wild Things,” Ms. Lawton will work closely with Dr. James Evans, Professor in UNC-Chapel Hill’s Department of Genetics and Robin Kirk, Director of the Duke Human Rights Center. In the Spring of 2018, PlayMakers Repertory Company will present a staged reading of “Among These Wild Things” in collaboration with the Department of Dramatic Art.

Jacqueline E. Lawton is a Professor in the Department of Dramatic Art, UNC-Chapel Hill. She was named one of 30 of the nation’s leading black playwrights by Arena Stage’s American Voices New Play Institute, which will open her latest play, Intelligence, later this month. Her other plays include Anna K; Blood-bound and Tongue-tied; Deep Belly Beautiful; The Devil’s Sweet Water; The Hampton Years; Love Brothers Serenade (semi-finalist, Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference); Mad Breed; Noms de Guerre. She has worked as a dramaturg and research consultant at Actors Theatre of Louisville, Humana Festival of New American Plays, Arden Theater, Arena Stage, Ensemble Studio Theater, Ford’s Theatre, Horizons Theater, Interact Theatre, Kennedy Center VSA Program, Round House Theatre, Theater J, Virginia Stage Company and Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company.

PlayMakers Repertory Company is the professional theater in residence at the College of Arts & Sciences within the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and North Carolina’s premier resident theater company for more than 40 years. PlayMakers has been named one of the “best regional theatres in America.”

For more information on this exciting new collaboration between the PlayMakers Repertory Company and the College of Arts & Sciences or to schedule an interview with Ms. Lawton, please contact Adam Versényi, Chair of the Department of Dramatic Art, at anversen@email.unc.edu.